“The good times,” we say. “Ah, those memories, those memories from childhood that still keep us alive. What wonderful memories.”
Pity the person who lost theirs.
“Oh, well,” we shrug. “Too bad for him. But, ah, our memories!”
We are such stupid, self-absorbed, conceited bastards. We have no idea, no such idea of what lost memories are. No, we cannot grasp the time consumed, how our pathetic little selves lived. No, we indeed do not understand how agonizing it must be to have lived but to have lost merely borrowed time, to slowly lose your grasp in reality. To have waded and flailed and cried your way through seventy-odd years, only to waste away without remembrance of exactly what you waded and flailed and cried for.
Alzheimer’s does tend to bring your life to a halt.
And you do tend to despair when you know, with a sinking heart and faltering fingers, that at the end of this page you might look back and wonder exactly what you were thinking, aside from the fact that you really had no idea what was running through your mind at the moment. And if you were ‘lucky’, maybe you’d realize that there might not have been a certain moment that you were thinking about such things at all. Then, later, maybe you’d wrapped your arms around your waist, bowed your head, then started, again, to rewrite whatever was on your mind, to ensure the cycle goes around, and around, and around again. Never ending, never halting once, always starting and ending the same way- aimless. Infinite. Hopeless.
Or maybe, occasionally, a little innocent child would waddle up to you, tug on your pants, even ask in that pure voice, “Granddaddy, will you play with me?”
Ah, the heart wrenching despair, or the blankness, or the confused expression that twists your lips in perplexity. “What?” you say. “Who…who are you?”
Their eyes would widen. “I’m Carrie. I’m your grand daughter. Remember me?” Irises would moisten, a pool of tears maybe gathered together, threatening to slip past cheeks, past lips, and finally dangling from their chins only to break past the grasps of infinity and splatter down on your hand.
“I’m sorry,” you’d shake your head politely. “I don’t know you. Not at all.”
It’s the hopelessness that your loved ones feel, not just the loss of memories and names and faces that haunt you day by day, that hinder you from living on any more time anymore. It’s the back of their heads that you see, not their faces, because to them you are already “gone”, there is no “plan” for you anymore, you are a “lost cause.”
The sad thing is, you have not the slightest idea of what they are talking about. You close your eyes, shaking your head with a smile that lingers on your lips from some mysterious and hidden joke, and when you open your eyes again you stare puzzledly at the half-filled page.
“What was I thinking again?”
